Wine goes mass market

Champagne Indage to launch vino in pet bottles and tetra packs

If you thought wine drinking was all about knowing your red wine from the white one and about uncorking a bottle without a social gaffe, here is something to bust the elitist notions about the beverage.

To popularise the drink in a non-wine drinking country like India, Champagne Indage Ltd, the wine-producing subsidiary of the Rs 500-crore Indage Group, is going plastic.

To reach out to more people and to improve the company's bottomline, it will start selling a new wine label "" Vino "" in PET bottles, TETRA packs and bags-in-a-box (jumbo-sized deflatable plastic barrels) from next month.

"We want to demystify the concept of wine drinking by making it available to a large number of consumers," says Santosh Verma, the head of business development at Champagne Indage which owns the Chateau Indage brand.

The company has already hired the media planning company Carat Media Ltd to chalk out its national strategy for Vino.

Popularising wine in India, where the per capita domestic wine consumption is minuscule at 4 ml or less than a teaspoon, may be an uphill task. But Chateau Indage hopes to change that and is banking on the new label Vino for the purpose.

By pricing a 1 litre Vino bottle between Rs 100 and Rs 150, Verma thinks it will be able to bring in more wine consumers into its loop. The product will roll out from the Champagne Indage wineries in Maharashtra next month.

"As part of our national strategy, we are breaking our own price barrier to reach the customer. Why should a person not get to taste wine just because he has less money in his pocket," asks Verma. The new line will be first launched in Maharashtra, followed by other states next year.

With Christmas and New Year round the corner, Verma is projecting a Rs 70 crore turnover for Champagne Indage this financial year, up from Rs 26 crore last year. "Driven by our perceived consumer requirement, the company is projecting a Rs 500-crore turnover in three years," he says. Indage Group, the group company, also has interests in construction, hotels and restaurants and owns a wine distribution firm in the UK.

Even as it is chalking out plans to launch Vino, the company has also set aside Rs 15 crore to promote its other popular brand "" Riviera "" though advertising. It has hired Saatchi and Saatchi to design the communications strategy for the brand.

The new ad campaign, to be launched next year, will be more about the brand than wine, says Verma.

Besides its hot-seller Riviera and the soon-to-be-launched Vino, the other Chateau Indage brands include Figueira, Vin Ballet, Chantilli and Joie.

A total of six lakh bottles are exported every year under exotic names such as Omar Khayaam, Mist of Sahyadri, Tantra Baramati, Soma, Ivy and Anarkali.

Chateau Indage also imports wine in bulk from France and other countries such as Australia, Chile and South Africa. Roughly, 80,000 litres of the bulk imported wine is bottled at the company's three wineries in Maharashtra's Narayan Gaon region, 90 km from Pune. Besides this, it also imports about 50 Bottled In Origin brands from several countries.

With the launch of its new label next month, Verma is bullish about growing the company's market share in wine sales. Last year, its domestic sales hovered around 1.2 million bottles. The company hopes to close this year at 3.4 million bottles.

With Chateau Indage going plastic and mass market, its rival wine companies "" Grover's Vineyards and Sula "" may start selling their products in plastic jars too.